News Story

Maxis has once again battled against the will of consumers to discuss why an Internet connection is required to play SimCity.

A straight-talking post from Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw has gone live. She explains the reasons behind the always-online decision.

"Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players," wrote Bradshaw.

"It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world."

Bradshaw then provided a list of reasons for users to continue playing with a connection:

We keep the simulation state of the region up to date for all players. Even when playing solo, this keeps the interactions between cities up to date in a shared view of the world.

Players who want to reach the peak of each specialization can count on surrounding cities to provide services or resources, even workers. As other players build, your city can draw on their resources.

Our Great Works rely on contributions from multiple cities in a region. Connected services keep each player’s contributions updated and the progression on Great Works moving ahead.

All of our social world features - world challenges, world events, world leaderboards and world achievements - use our servers to update the status of all cities.

Our servers handle gifts between players.

We’ve created a dynamic supply and demand model for trading by keeping a Global Market updated with changing demands on key resources.

We update each city’s visual representation as well. If you visit another player’s city, you’ll see the most up to date visual status.

We even check to make sure that all the cities saved are legit, so that the region play, leaderboards, challenges and achievements rewards and status have integrity.

Last week, one player managed to access SimCity's offline timer to get the game working offline. As posted on NeoGaf, it proves Maxis coded the game to boot players after 20 minutes of playing without a connection.

Are you currently playing SimCity? Would you like the option to play offline?